[davelab6]

Metafont has never found wide adoption, because to be a triple threat of typeface designer, mathematician, and software developer, you basically have to be a tenured stanford professor or their grad student to have enough time to learn everything well enough to make useful type.

And even then, the typefaces made with metafont are often very poor designs compared to those draw in a GUI in a 'dumbfont' format.

Adobe Multiple Master, then TrueType GX, and now OpenType Variations, are a 'best of both worlds' compromise; the drawing quality of visually crafted outlines, and the continuous-space-type-family-in-1-file typographic flexibility of metafont.